


A light that might give up the way

by Skoll



Series: A constant reminder [1]
Category: Iron Man (Movies), The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, FrostIron - Freeform, M/M, Pre-Slash, Soulmates, Tony and Loki are possibly the least likely soulmates ever, Yet I seem to have written them nevertheless
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-24
Updated: 2013-02-24
Packaged: 2017-12-03 12:13:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,142
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/698125
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Skoll/pseuds/Skoll
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Soulmates, these days, are only stories; as everyone knows, soulmates just stopped existing, suddenly, about a thousand years ago.  These days, nobody's born with the name of the person meant for them on their skin, and the closest most people get to soulmates is picking up a bad harlequin romance about them at their local bookstores.</p>
<p>Tony Stark, as usual, isn't like most people.</p>
<p>(Or: In a world where there hasn't been a human soulmate pair in over a thousand years, Tony's born with a name at the small of his back, a magnetic pull at his spine that seems to lead to nowhere, and no soulmate that he can find on the face of the planet.  Understandably, he isn't very pleased about this.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	A light that might give up the way

**Author's Note:**

> Here I thought I was done with self-indulgent ridiculous plots when I finished up my Norse god!Tony series, but apparently not. This idea occurred to me when I should have been studying for an exam, and refused to go away until I wrote it. So here it is: a frostiron soulmates AU. Seriously.
> 
> The title to this is taken from the Mumford and Sons song 'Reminder', which is a lovely song everyone should listen to.
> 
> Enjoy.

Tony's putting his shirt on in the dark when she wakes up.

He winces at the rustling sound of the sheets, aware that he's just been caught out in the middle of bad one-night stand etiquette. Sneaking out in the dark is alright, to a point—god knows Tony's done it often enough—but he's about ninety percent certain she drunkenly promised him breakfast earlier tonight, which he, equally drunkenly, correctly interpreted as 'breakfast and more sex.' One does not simply sneak out when breakfast and morning sex are on offer.

Still, though, here Tony is. Sneaking. Cut him some slack, alright, he's only about seventy-five percent sure he even remembers her name. Etiquette wise, he's already fucked here.

She makes a low, pleased sort of rumbling noise when she first wakes up; Tony can place the moment, by sound alone, where she realizes he isn't staying. She lets out this little huff of air and the sheets rustle again as she gives up on curling into him. “Not a breakfast kinda guy, huh?” she asks, with no real regret in her voice. They both knew what this was and where it was going before it started: namely, into her bed, and then no further. Tony's glad she's sticking to that knowledge when it counts.

“No,” he says, truthfully. “Not so much.”

He jumps, slightly, when her hand comes to rest just above the small of his back, over the fabric of his shirt. He closes his eyes in the dark. “Guess I don't have to ask why, do I?” she asks, and no. No, she doesn't. Because even if her hand missed what it was aiming for—an inch too low, and slightly to the left of where she meant it to be—Tony can still precisely place what she meant to touch. 

“It's not for that,” he says, and she snorts in evident disbelief. “Hey, no, it's not.” Not in the way she means it, anyway. He pulls away from her hands and stands, heading towards where he last remembers seeing his pants. This whole dressing in the dark thing is overrated, though probably better for the hangover Tony's going to have coming on pretty soon.

“Well,” she says, “I guess at least now when I see you in the newspapers, I'll be able to honestly say I tapped Tony Stark.”

He laughs, shaking his head, and finds his pants. “Isn't that what life's about, in the end?”

…

The thing is, right, Tony Stark was going to be famous anyway. He's a Stark, for a start. Even if all he'd done with his life was retire to a country home and grow petunias, the media would've occasionally run a story about how disappointing it was that Tony Stark wasn't like his old man. With what Tony actually did with his life—become a genius inventor, a talented weapons merchant and then a better man who changed his empire, become Iron Man and a bit of a manwhore besides—well. The media's all over Tony Stark, and Tony recognizes that it always would have been that way, even if he wasn't also some sort of tragic romantic figure in the flesh.

But those things came later. Those things are what Tony did, the decisions he made with his life—and he won't claim they were all good decisions, but they were things he chose. He brought those things on himself.

Tony was famous before he even had a chance to learn how to walk, though, and that was nothing he chose.

…

“Mr. Stark!” the persistent reporter—though, really, is there any other kind of reporter?—calls, and actually gets up in Tony's face to ask it. Tony contemplates just pushing the guy out of the way and going about his business, but he knows what that leads to. Pepper will kill him if 'Tony Stark Assaults Paparazzi!' makes the headlines this week, so soon after 'Iron Man Destroys City Property!' Which, okay, Tony's still a little sore about that one, considering that makes him sound like a willing participant in the destruction rather than say, someone who got thrown through a window while wearing a giant metal suit and just so happened to collide with government property. Still. No shoving reporters, this week.

So he says, resigned to his fate, “Yes?” He's about to be asked one of maybe four questions; Tony makes an internal bet on which one it's going to be.

“Have there been any developments in the search for your soulmate?” the reporter says, and Tony pointedly doesn't react at all. Yeah, he pretty much saw that one coming.

“No comment,” he says. “Now if you'll excuse me—”

Doggedly, the reporter asks, “How does it feel, Mr. Stark, to be the first confirmed soulmate in over a thousand years?”

Tony's expression doesn't slip a bit. “No comment,” he says, and moves to walk past the reporter. Seriously, he's been done with this conversation since before the reporter ever started talking. He's been done with it since about thirty years ago, when he was first deemed old enough to answer questions about it. Just done.

“Mr. Stark,” the reporter says, “is there any truth to the reports that you having a soulmate mark led to the distance between yourself and your father?”

Right.

…

Tony Stark Assaults Paparazzi! (full details page three.)

…

Soulmates, these days, are only stories. The problem is, those stories are everywhere.

And Tony does mean everywhere. Everything from children's bedtime stories to bad harlequin romances to philosophical discussions of the human soul reference soulmates. It's like humanity can't get enough of the concept of people being tied together at the soul, of being made for each other. 

The concept is even more romantic because, as everyone knows, soulmates just don't exist anymore. They were something out of a more primitive time for humanity—some historians even claim there's evidence humans had soulmates from the very start of their evolution as a species—that petered out when civilization and enlightenment began to span the globe. The last recorded soulmate pair in human history lived in Iceland, and that was back before Iceland even converted to Christianity, over a thousand years ago. Soulmates, to most people, are no more real than the Norse gods the last pair of soulmates worshipped.

So there it is, the simple fact that everyone knows: people simply don't go around wearing the name of the person meant for them on their skin, anymore.

One small problem, of course: Tony Stark does.

…

“It's like I'm this compass,” Tony tried to explain, once, to Rhodey. In the way of these sorts of things, he only decided explaining would be a good idea when he was already drunk enough that he'd been sprawled on Rhodey's dorm floor, shirtless and singing, for the better part of half an hour. Rhodey had been much more sober, out of what he claimed was responsibility and Tony claimed was not knowing how to have fun. It's an argument they've continued throughout their entire friendship.

That night, Rhodey was just drunk enough not to mind Tony's drunkenness, and just sober enough to remember it later. “Your drunk metaphors are terrible,” Rhodey said, and nudged Tony's shoulder with his foot. “Are you ever planning on getting up?”

Tony thought about it and shook his head. “Nope. I like it here. I like your floor, it's very—solid. And not moving. So good job having a nice floor, Rhodey my man.” Rhodey snorted and nudged Tony again, companionably. “And—the thing, the compass thing—it wasn't a metaphor.” He reached up one hand and dropped it gracelessly on his own back. Even drunk, of course, it landed precisely where he meant it to, one finger on each of the four little letters on his bare skin. “I mean this,” he said, and turned his head to the side until his cheek was pressing into the floor and he could meet Rhodey's eyes. “A compass pointing at nothing.”

Rhodey's eyes widened, just slightly. “Hey, Tones, you might not want to talk about that.” Tony never talked about the whole mess—soulmate, soulmark and solitude—sober. “You usually don't—”

“I never do,” Tony agrees. “I can't. It's—you can't talk about something that isn't. Or you can try but it doesn't make a lot of sense and usually it means that people don't—look. Look. It's because I'm not a soulmate. I can't be. So I can't talk about it.”

“Tony,” Rhodey said, hesitantly, and reached out to grab Tony's arm. “You are. No matter how much you might not want to be.”

Tony shook his head again and said, “Not that. I don't mean—hey, Rhodey, you know me, am I dumb? I know what I am, I was born with a name on my back and no one's let me forget it since, I know. I've got a soulmate mark. But I'm not a soulmate because you need two to be a mate. One's just some undergrad genius engineer with the shit luck to have a name on his back and it doesn't mean anything unless there's a north. Compass. Thing.” The explanation had to end there, because, “Hey, Rhodes? Think I'm gonna be sick.”

After Rhodey was done cursing and dragging him to the bathroom, and Tony was done getting the vodka out of his stomach, they never finished the talk. After that, Tony didn't try to explain again.

…

Tony's secret: He wants. More than almost anything. He's not a romantic—actually, come to that, Tony's pretty skeptical of love in general, considering his role models for it were his parents, which, the less said there the better. But he wants so badly not to be half a soulmate pair anymore. He doesn't even—shit, with Tony's luck he'd manage to fuck up even something as supposedly perfect as being a soulmate. He's realistic about this. He doesn't want this to be his perfect happy ending, he's not going to be riding off into sunsets anytime soon, he's not even sure he wants love out of this.

What he wants is to stop feeling like he was put on this planet as some sort of cosmic joke, always waiting for something that never comes. He doesn't tell anyone this, but the skin on his back where those four letters lie feels polarized, like some indefinable tug at his spine that never goes away—but, like he told Rhodey, that pull goes nowhere. Tony's traveled the world and never felt the pull get any stronger or any weaker. He's looked, and there's nothing.

It's a nothing that wakes him up at nights, though, reaching for someone who isn't there. It's a nothing that makes some part of him feel unsatisfied even by really good sex, by good company, by getting to invent things that change the world. It's a nothing that's dragged him into the media's view since he was born, that's stripped him of any hopes of privacy he ever had, that defines the majority of who Tony is in the eyes of most of the adult world. It's nothing, and yet it makes him the odd man out, one against nearly seven billion, and Tony hates that. 

What Tony wants is for that to end. If the mark has to mean that much to him, he at least wants it to be something more than four letters that don't mean a thing. He wants that much.

…

Tony places his hand just above the small of his back, pushing down against the magnet pull of four little letters. His fingers trace out the shape of the name there, the name Tony knows so well he can find it in the dark while staggering drunk. Just four letters, and yet they've shaped the course of Tony's entire life.

Tony doesn't pray, but sometimes he can't resist just throwing words out to the universe and hoping that somehow, somewhere, they'll stick. “Hey,” he says, and runs his fingers along each of the four letters in turn. “If you can hear me, you'd better hurry up and get here. You can ask just about anybody who's ever spoken to me, they'll all be happy to tell you exactly how patient I'm not. Whoever you are, where ever you are, just—stop making me wait. I'm starting to think you're not even on this planet, okay, and I shouldn't have to honestly consider that as a possibility. You're taking too long.”

L-o-k-i. Seriously. As if anyone actually names a kid after the Norse god of mischief these days. Except there it is, his soulmate's name, a fact on Tony's skin: Loki.

Tony closes his eyes and lets himself—not hope. Not really. He lets himself wonder.

When he opens his eyes, as always, he's still alone.

**Author's Note:**

> So there it is. I have absolutely no idea whether this plot is going to demand a sequel at some point in the future, but now it is at least written, and I can go back to studying. If you got this far, I hope you enjoyed.
> 
> EDIT 3/4: Clearly this did demand a sequel, which is now posted.


End file.
